DRUG GANGS EPIDEMIC IN OUR TOWNS
‘County lines’ crews double in a year to 1,500 ++ Dealers as young as 13 arrested ++ Ringleaders rake in £2.5bn
The disturbing scale of the ‘county lines’ national crime epidemic was laid bare yesterday.
Officials said the number of operations shipping heroin and crack cocaine from cities to provincial towns had doubled to 1,500 in a year.
Using youngsters as drug mules, gangs are making a combined £7million a day – around £2.5billion a year. Last night it also emerged that: 200 suspects were arrested in just one week in the first round-Britain crackdown on the gangs;
Dealers as young as 13 were among those held by police;
Officers seized scores of weapons including loaded guns, a samurai sword and hunting knives.
The shocking results of the crackdown by all the country’s constabularies will intensify calls for politicians and police to step up their response to the county lines networks.
The term refers to the phone lines used by gangs to sell and distribute drugs.
Yesterday the National County Lines Coordination Centre unveiled estimates showing the number of operations has
soared from 720 last November to 1,500 today. Each county lines route is making as much as £5,000 a day – £7million between them all.
The youngest offender caught in last week’s crackdown is thought to be a boy of 13 held in Essex on suspicion of possessing a Class A drug with intent to supply.
A boy of 16 was arrested in York at a drugs den more than 100 miles from his home in Merseyside. Police rescued 58 vulnerable people including a number of child drug slaves being held in appalling conditions.
Regional crime units seized scores of weapons including a samurai sword, loaded guns, a zombie knife, an axe, a meat cleaver and hunting knives.
Huge quantities of class A drugs and around £100,000 in cash were also recovered from residential properties, including the homes of drug addicts taken over by gangs to use as a base in a tactic known as ‘cuckooing’.
Vince O’Brien, head of drugs operations at the National Crime Agency, said dozens of groups were disrupted and some lines shut down.
The £3.6million coordination centre was set up in September to map the activities of the gangs which have spread from large cities such as London, Liverpool and Birmingham into rural areas.
Many of the arrests last week demonstrated that child and adult drug couriers are travelling across the country.
Among those arrested in North Yorkshire were suspects from Bradford, Manchester, Middlesbrough and Merseyside.
Dealers from Nottingham were picked up selling drugs in Newquay, Cornwall.
Raids on gang headquarters in Liverpool turned up large quantities of cocaine and
‘Samurai sword and loaded guns’
cannabis as well as more than £80,000 in cash. There were 22 arrests in just two days in Norfolk and 19 more in Suffolk.
British Transport Police deployed undercover officers to smash a gang using the railways to move cocaine, cannabis and heroin around the country. The force has identified around 476 drug couriers using the rail network, 131 of them ‘frequent train travellers’.
Last week ten members of a gang were caught at Clapham Junction, Peterborough and Waterloo stations. Transport police also targeted specific railway stations such as Shrewsbury which is used to ship drugs from Merseyside, Wolverhampton and Birmingham to smaller rural towns.
Mr O’Brien said: ‘These arrests say something about the scale of the problem.
‘If we are talking about over 1,000 lines with multiple people in each line then this is the level of activity that we need to be carrying out to make a difference to this problem.
‘We have been really clear that this will be the first of a number of intensifications against this.
‘This is one of the first steps, but this will be the first of many.
‘We are absolutely focused on the need to tackle these networks because of the harm they cause.
‘Out of 200 arrests I would hope that we have got the gangs that are behind organising these lines.
‘Whether they are Mr Bigs or not, these are the people who are actually running the lines so these were important arrests to make.’
Last month a Mail investigation revealed the scale of the county lines crisis which is thought to have enslaved thousands of children – prompting an intervention from Sajid Javid.
Yesterday the Home Secretary said: ‘ Three weeks ago in this paper, I committed to wage war on the child slave drug gangs running county lines across the country. Enslaving vulnerable children and forcing them to traffic drugs is an appalling crime and it must stop. ‘We have invested £3.6million in a new National County Lines Coordination Centre – one of the key commitments in our £40million serious violence strategy. The centre is already making an impact, identifying county lines hotspots and disrupting the criminal networks behind them.
‘Following a week of action from the National Crime Agency and police forces across the country, more than 200 arrests have been made and 58 vulnerable people have been saved from harm.’
Met deputy assistant commissioner Duncan Ball said: ‘Our primary aim in dismantling these networks is protecting the young and vulnerable people who are exploited by gangs and are subject to violence, fear and intimidation.’
LaST month the Mail highlighted the sickening exploitation of vulnerable children by ruthless ‘county lines’ drug gangs.
Boys and girls as young as 12 are ‘groomed’ in their thousands to peddle heroin and cocaine miles from home – becoming caught in a web of brutality and intimidation.
as well as a crime epidemic, this is a full-blown child protection crisis. So we applaud the National Crime agency’s crackdown on the networks, which led to more than 200 arrests and the seizure of vast quantities of weapons and drugs. detectives also rescued 58 vulnerable people, including child slaves.
If only the police were as assiduous in tackling all crime. Last year they turned a blind eye to almost a million offences – including sex assaults and violent attacks.
We frequently hear chief constables complain that they struggle to cope with funding cuts. But there may be more sympathy if they were less obsessed with trendy causes such as hate crime.
If victims are attacked because of their race, religion or sexual orientation, it’s entirely right that this is investigated. But many of these alleged offences are relatively trivial, with only around one in seven serious enough to be referred for prosecution.
Yet astonishingly, ministers are considering expanding the hate crime list to include hostility towards men, and even sub-cultures such as Goths or punks.
Wouldn’t it be better if politicians and police focused on solving crimes that are already on the statute book – rather than inventing spurious new ones?